The Solar System is a busy place, with spacecraft currently visiting most of the planets as well as some dwarf planets and comets. Akatsuki is at Venus, several rovers and orbiters are at Mars, the Juno spacecraft just reached […]

United Launch Alliance (ULA) has successfully flown its highly reliable Atlas V booster out of Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., to deliver the four-spacecraft flotilla of NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission (MMS) into a Highly Elliptical Orbit (HEO) to explore the microphysics of “magnetic reconnection,” a process which converts magnetic energy into heat and […]

Artist’s concept of MMS, a mission to study how magnetic fields release energy in a process known as magnetic reconnection. MMS consists of four identical observatories that will fly in a tight formation and provide the first 3-D view of magnetic reconnection. Photo Credit: NASA

A visualization of the Earth’s radiation belts, based on data that were gathered by NASA’s twin Van Allen probes. The Earth is seen to be surrounded by the plasmapause (blue-green area) and the two main radiation belts further out (multi-color area). The boundary between the plasmapause and the inner edge of the outer […]

NASA’s Van Allen Probes orbit through two giant radiation belts surrounding Earth. In the time since launching two years ago, the probes have discovered a third radiation belt, and other observations have helped explain how particles in the belts can be sped up to nearly the speed of light.Image Caption and Credit: NASA

Artist’s impression of NASA’s Solar Probe Plus spacecraft approaching the Sun. Set to launch in 2018, Solar Probe Plus will orbit our home star a total of 24 times while gradually approaching closer with each concecutive orbit, until it eventually achieves a minimum distance of 8.5 solar radii, or 3.7 million miles from […]

ASTROTECH CORPORATION and its Astrotech Space Operations subsidiary, leading providers of commercial space services, announced that NASA has awarded Astrotech a contract to provide facilities and pre-launch processing services for the Magnetospheric MultiScale (MMS) mission to launch in late 2014.

The Cassini spacecraft peers through Titan’s thick clouds to spy on the region dubbed “Senkyo” by scientists. The dark features include vast fields of dunes, composed of solid hydrocarbon particles precipitated out of Titan’s atmosphere. And Titan’s southern pole is shrouded in the recently formed polar vortex.